DEDICATION price fishback

To Robert Higgs

This book is dedicated to Robert Higgs, one of its coauthors. Bob is many things to each of us: a close friend, a mentor, a teacher, and a student. Those of us who took courses with him consider him to be one of the best lecturers that we have ever seen at the undergraduate level. He gave such lucid and entertaining descriptions of the ins and outs of and the mixed economy that his students were enthralled by what many thought would be a dry subject. Bob managed this without pyrotechnics and in a relatively quiet manner. But we could see his passion for the subject, and his dry sense of humor constantly caught us off guard. My only complaint was that he kept referring to Louisville, Kentucky, my hometown, as one of the “Seven Lost Cities of America.” Bob would always tell us that the Kentucky Derby, run there every year, was actually staged on a movie back lot in California because the favorite almost never won and Hollywood loved stories in which the underdog wins. In his graduate seminars he let his students run wild with ideas and opinions while he gently (and sometimes archly) guided us through the mixture of brilliant thought and sometimes absolute lunacy of some of the papers that we were reading. Our favorite expression of Bob’s was “the look”: one eyebrow arched well above the top of his glasses as he passionately tore apart an analysis that he thought was fl awed. Bob al- lowed students to make major mistakes but never criticized them per- sonally in class. Instead, he allowed them to fi gure out the errors of their ways. In one case I proudly presented a paper by a famous economic historian and thought I had ripped it to shreds. Bob allowed the discus- sion to reveal the true essence of the paper and the test involved. By the end of the class I knew that I had totally misunderstood the author’s intentions, although Bob had never come out and told me I was wrong. The ’s written examination in economic history in the late 1970s was a weekend-long test in which three leading scholars each asked an overarching question. Bob’s question was, “How

v vi DEDICATION had government grown in the United States in the twentieth century? Was it an evolutionary process or one marked by responses to crises?” I wrote what I thought to be a brilliant defense of the growth of govern- ment as an evolutionary process. Of course, Bob was in the early stages of writing Crisis and Leviathan, which took the opposite tack. Yet Bob gave me a high pass on the exam and became my dissertation chair. He was a great advisor, listening as I explored my ideas and helping me enormously in copyediting and criticizing the voluminous drafts that I kept handing him. His guidance of my thesis set the stage for a series of papers that carried me through my years as an assistant professor. In similar ways Bob helped guide all the scholars that have contributed to this book. Those who did not matriculate at the University of Wash- ington learned from him through his writings, their conversations with him, and their correspondence. It seems as if Bob has read everything. He devoured the literature as he did his meals at the International House of Pancakes, where he seemed to eat lunch every day of the year in the late 1970s. On any given day Bob’s lunch partners could get involved in deep discourses concerning a range of subjects in , politics, history, and the broader social sciences. Monthly lunches with Bob, , and Morris David Morris, in which great books in economic history were discussed, were lively affairs; each held a different point of view, and the students all chimed in with even more diverse opinions. Bob became a close friend to many of us, joining pick-up basketball games at the student recreation center and fl ashing his skills, hard won on the dusty courts in the San Joaquin Valley, as point guard on our champion- ship intramural teams. He particularly liked our team name: the Poorly Defi ned Property Rights. Bob has truly made his mark in his research. Doug North recognized his potential immediately. The academic labor market in economics has typically consisted of graduates-to-be in ill-fi tting suits wandering the hallways at American Economic Association meetings and interview- ing with faculty members in hotel sitting rooms. When Bob got to the University of Washington’s room, Doug pulled him into the room and immediately offered him a job. Many departments were hiring economic historians, and Bob, one of ’s best students, was already writing a dissertation about the impact of urban areas on location theory and the development of Western cities in the late nine- teenth century. In the early 1970s Bob wrote The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865–1914. In that thin volume he deviated DEDICATION VII from the focus of most of the literature at the time. Each chapter was a gem that foreshadowed major strands of research in economic history that developed over the next several decades: the role of urban areas in stimulating inventive activity, the role of uncertainty as opposed to ex- ploitation in the farm protest movements, the economic nature of share tenancy, the role played by discrimination and human capital in deter- mining the wages of immigrants, blacks, and native white workers, the importance of health to the productivity of American workers, and the factors that infl uenced their health, to name a few. Bob’s masterpiece about the experience of black workers in the South after the Civil War, Competition and Coercion (1977), described the interplay of market competition, which often served to limit the discrimination faced by African Americans, and coercion by govern- ments and others, which often effectively retarded their progress. Many models of discrimination in use at the time were based on a distaste for working with blacks. Bob suggested that the economic models ap- plied “more to a kind of tea-party discrimination than to the blood and steel of the Southern racial scene” (9). He expanded his work on share tenancy in that book and in later articles written with Lee Alston. Bob understood share tenancy and poverty because he was born an Okie to parents who had farmed land for “thirds and fourths” and lived in a shack with no electricity in the 1930s. After moving to California in 1951, his family lived in a labor camp for a while—outdoor toilets in- cluded at no extra charge, inasmuch as there were no indoor toilets. Bob always told us that since leaving the camp in 1951 he has lived on Easy Street, that is, he has always had indoor plumbing, his one-dimensional index of economic development. After his experience in riding out the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in southern Louisiana, he is thinking about including a second dimension: access to a hot shower. He wrote major papers about intrafi rm wage differentials for blacks and whites and about the relative changes in their wealth. His work with Robert McGuire further addressed the role played by uncertainty in determining the choice of crops planted in the South and in driving farm protest in the Midwest and the Plains states. He documented the horrendous treatment of Japanese immigrants, who were denied access to land ownership in California and other states and then shunted away to detention camps during World War II. In the 1980s Bob became interested in the growth of government, in particular the federal government, during the twentieth century. He has noted the importance of evolutionary forces in establishing an upward viii DEDICATION trend, but in “16 Myths about the Growth of Government” he shows quite clearly why the evolutionary stories told are incomplete. In Crisis and Leviathan he documents a “ratchet effect” in the scope of govern- ment authority associated with the major crises of the twentieth cen- tury, the world wars and the Great Depression. Each crisis engendered an expansion in government authority that went far beyond the statistics about employment and spending and ranged into expansions in regula- tory authority over decisions made by consumers and producers. As the crises receded, the government’s scope receded, but it never returned to the level predicted on the basis of the evolutionary trend. Thus, the government’s scope kept ratcheting up over time. People interested in using government for their own ends have increased their use of crisis language, so that smaller and smaller crises now engender government responses. Government occasionally recedes in some areas, but Bob’s work predicted the expansion in government authority and agencies re- lated to the horrible events of September 11, 2001, which he documents in Against Government: Government Power and a Free Society. Among the causes of the ratchet effect were changes in the ideology of the elites and the general public that led to greater acceptance of gov- ernment activity. Doug North had argued for the importance of ideol- ogy in his 1982 book Structure and Change, and Bob was one of the fi rst to take these thoughts to heart as he carefully developed a framework and defi nition of ideology that he could use effectively in making his arguments about the growth of government. In 1992 Bob developed a strain of research concerning the economic welfare of people during and immediately after World War II. In “War- time Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s,” published in the Journal of Economic History, he powerfully argued that World War II should be considered an extension of the Great De- pression and not a huge Keynesian stimulus to the economy. He showed how standard government statistics misrepresented the true extent of consumption of normal goods during the war and documented the costs to the economic welfare of the American people of fi ghting the war. Unemployment was reduced by drafting millions of men into the armed forces, where many faced far worse conditions than they ever saw on the unemployment lines during the 1930s. We may have needed to fi ght the war to prevent Hitler from leaving the world in a terrible condition, but the costs were enormous and were underappreciated before Bob’s article appeared When most of us fi rst met Bob he was a free-market economist who believed strongly that markets worked well. Over time he has be- DEDICATION IX come more and more closely associated with libertarian and Austrian thought. His belief in free markets and in the protection of individual freedoms from government interference increasingly marked his writ- ing as he moved from the University of Washington to Lafayette Col- lege to Seattle University and to his current position as editor of the Independent Review for the Independent Institute. Bob’s passion for protection of freedoms shines through strong and clear in his recent writings. He cares deeply about the state of our society; therefore, he has written lucid defenses of classical liberal thought and heartfelt and powerful criticisms of increasing limits on personal freedom. The au- thors of this book all are independent thinkers in their own right. We share many of Bob’s views about the importance of property rights, the rule of law, and the protection of individual freedoms to the health and welfare of our society. Yet we also have our disagreements with Bob and among ourselves about how far the role of government should ex- tend. A number of us are less skeptical than Bob is about certain roles played by the government. Yet we each can say that sharing our profes- sion with Robert Higgs has contributed greatly to our careers. More important, sharing his friendship has enriched our lives immeasurably. —Price Fishback